I was only working because the company was paying me to. In Marxist terms, I was alienated from my labour: forced to think about a problem I didn’t personally have a stake in, in a very typically corporate environment that drained all the motivation out of me. I remember thinking: is this it?Ouch-I'm sorry to read that she feels so beleaguered. While I can certainly empathize with that conundrum, this feels to me not so much like a problem with tech (as this was presented in the context of a deep personal exploration of one's participation as a tech worker), but perhaps an opportunity to sit back and analyze one's participation with work as a concept itself.
It brings to mind this[1] letter written by Hunter S Thompson where he said:
So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life
This isn't to hold the good Doctor up as some universal bearer of truth (he had his issues that probably cast a bit of a cloud over some of his pieces of advice), but this one rings loudly for me as someone who doesn't really look at his career field of software engineering as a personal definition, but simply a vehicle that enables me to do the sort of things I want. It's a parenthetical, a sidebar, it isn't the paragraph that describes who I am as `iamdave`. But as I look at my peers (older millennials-what's the new word now? xennial? I'm 35, what am I? Weren't we once Gen Y? I feel emotionally closer to Gen X. Surely the marketers will have a new term for it come next Tuesday and we'll all be using that. Hrm...I'm getting off topic here), I see so much frustration, anxiety and anger because their careers are defining them with little further introspection than that.
Said another way: I just happen to be a software engineer, it's by no means a passion, it's not where my heart is, it's not what I wake up every day thinking about-I just happen to be good enough at it to earn a living doing it and pay for school to learn about the types of things that do excite and thrill me on a meaningful personal level. I also don't inherently dread it, nor do I loathe going to work every day-either. Granted it took a long time to get to this state of mind but my personal happiness has skyrocketed once the realization took hold.
Now I say that not to accuse or suggest that my peers are wrong for this; what's good for the goose may not be good for the gander, nor am I saying my approach is universal or should be the standard for all others-but it does seem to be a mitigating factor from the type of...can't think of a better word here...existential exhaustion this young(er) writer seems to be experiencing.
Curious to hear what others think?
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[1] https://tranquilmonkey.com/hunter-s-thompsons-extraordinary-...